Bill King says coverage of the events surrounding the missing Malaysian jetliner has shown us how different cultures are similar in many ways.

By Bill King |
April 5, 2014
| Updated: April 5, 2014 2:38pm

Over the past four weeks, the world has been mesmerized by the unfolding events of the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

There have been many aspects to the story, but most gripping has been seeing the anguish of passengers' families. People from every corner of the globe have cried and prayed and hoped beyond hope with those trapped in their interminable hell of not knowing what has happened to their loved ones.

It has mattered little that most of the families are Chinese, and many are Buddhist. Scores of countries have lent aid to the search effort, held prayer vigils and offered other assistance.

Parents of every faith, nationality, creed and color have watched the parents of children who were passengers on the flight and readily understood their pain upon the loss of a child. A global community choked back tears when the husband of a flight attendant on the missing jetliner told the story of his 5-year old daughter asking when her mother was coming home.

It is not that the tragedy of these 239 families is any greater than the thousands of others who lose loved ones to accidents or senseless diseases every day. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 3,000 people die each day just from injuries sustained in automobile accidents. The difference is that we have witnessed the Malaysian Airlines families' agony in high definition and real time.

The episode has reminded me of a photograph published a few years ago by National Geographic of a grave that had been discovered in northern Africa. About 8,000 years ago, a young woman and two small children had been lovingly laid in the grave on a bed of flowers, holding hands and embracing each other.

Any human being in the world looking at that photograph knows that this family was likely buried by the missing family member, the husband and father. We do not know what language that man spoke, what god he worshipped or even the color of his skin. But across eight millennia and half a globe away, we all know intuitively the pain he felt in that tragic parting with his young family.

It is that ability to empathize with our fellow humans that separates us from other species. It is the foundation of civilization. But empathy is limited to our ability to experience the actual suffering of particular individuals.

Someone can tell us that 3,000 people died yesterday in car accidents, but unless we know the individuals or their families, it does not evoke an emotional response in us. Until the past several decades, our ability to share those tragic experiences with our fellow humans has been relatively limited to those nearby. And those from other parts of the globe or from different cultures seemed so remote and different from us that it was harder to imagine they shared our experiences and emotions.

But technology has changed all that. Now we can see the pain in the face of a Chinese factory worker who has lost his only child as easily as someone with a similar loss in our hometown. We can see the tears welling in his eyes; hear the trembling in his voice. Suddenly, he seems not much different from us.

This new ability to connect with other people from places far away and which most of us will never visit in person will change the world. Wars have largely been possible because of leaders' abilities to demonize their enemies. As people increasingly see that they have more in common with their fellow humans than differences, it will be harder to see them as enemies.

If you have personally watched someone bury a child, it will be hard to ever hate that person.

Scientists have learned all humans share 99.9 percent of the same DNA, and some now believe that all humans are the descendants from a single woman who lived about 150,000 years ago, a "mitochondrial" Eve.

It is a great irony that while science and faith have supposedly been at war since The Enlightenment, science has now proved what every great faith tradition has been teaching for millennia: We are all brothers and sisters, literally.

And now with the revolution in communication technology, we are seeing for ourselves that it is true.

King's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Email King at weking@weking.net and follow him at twitter.com/weking.